Monthly Archive for April, 2007

I’m not a huge fan of studying. It’s one of those unavoidable things like taxes, death and saturated fats. But apart from the fact that it’s drudgery and seemingly serves no purpose, I hate it because it steals simplicity from my life.

To illustrate, today for about ten hours, I spent studying and solving problems on aircraft propulsion (It’s a side course, deviating from my specialization). Though it’s only a basic course and it’s just an introduction, I know more about aircraft engines than I knew before. I was always extremely interested in aircraft engines, and wanted to learn about powerful ones, the fuels, the magic of flight. Instead however, I ended up leafing through thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. The charm of aircraft propulsion went out the window.

However this isn’t what annoys me. It’s the fact that I’ll never go another flight in my life without pondering what would be the various stage temperatures, mach numbers and the compressibilities and everything around the engine. I just won’t.

The other day I was reading for a course, and had to learn about eight different types of refrigerators. Though I mainly studied the brief working and the thermodynamics of it I came to a horrible realization. The freeze ray cannot exist!!! The laws of physics prohibit it from existing! And next time I watch a cartoon, that’s all gonna come into my head.

This isn’t with studying itself. I can’t visit a website without wondering how it’s built and having a peek at the css, I can’t play a game without wondering about the technical considerations on building it. I can’t do anything without pondering about it’s intricacies. I can’t listen to a single song without trying to isolate it’s basslines. It’s driving me crazy!!!

This had been always a problem with me since I was small, I was engrossed in wondering how things worked. The more I know, the more I think. With every page I read, with every documentary I watch, it grows, and gets bigger. Though it’s a good thing seemingly, it’s annoying having a voice in your head that keeps pondering about everything from economics to gardening. There is a bright side though. This makes me an extremely fast learner and I can pick up any new technique much faster than average. Just as long as it doesen’t involve thermodynamics. But it came to a point when I just wanted to smell a flower without wondering about it’s composition. I knew I had to do something.

I now have to practice not thinking or thinking about lighter and more interesting things. Daydreaming helps. This also allows me to be a lot more present minded and with quicker responses here and there. But every time I go into something technical or start something new, it happens again, and it also manifests itself in the form of some extremely complicated nightmares.

Sigh, a few more days of study and it’ll be all over and I can get back to killing my brain cells with melodic death metal and cartoons.

Now playing: Aces High by Iron Maiden

If you see an image here, it’s worked!!!

I decided I have to write something, take a few minutes off and post something on the site and when I was forming yet another work of drudgery, I asked myself if my life was interesting enough.

Judge for yourself.
I woke up at 9 after sleeping at 1 the previous night (8 hours of sleep during exam time! omfg)
I went to the library at 10 and got back around 9:30 in the night, and did some random junk until 12. Wrote this post at 12:30.

Now nothing really eventful seems to have happened, atleast nothing worth mentioning, and even the interesting tidbits are a tad too private to write in here.

And unless you’re some kind of superhero or whatever, I daresay your life isn’t too much more interesting (of course, there’s plenty of fun stories to tell when I’m not buried under six feet of books, ie, one week before and after today)

So what’s the point of personal weblogs anyways, Is it for everyone to broadcast their once in a week rants?

I’m sick of seeing obscure blogspot weblogs which go like “Random ramblings of a madman” or something like that. If you got something sensible to say, say it. And everyone thinks they’ll write one behemoth post about life and love and close it at that. Not everyone are suited for online publishing, but I wish to prove myself otherwise.

Now the blogosphere is also filled up with bloggers who wish to make this a source of their income, and they manage to do so, writing about the latest in technology and news, and what not.

So is the personal weblog fading from existance, with only the drive to produce an income holding some into the game, while most people find it too much of a chore to broadcast their each and every thought?

Well, I feel no. People who want to write will write. A few people will read, and that makes all the difference. Sure I don’t have a gazillion readers, but the five or six that I care about makes all the difference.

Well, loyal readers, I have exams to study for, supervillans to battle, and cattle to herd, but rest assured, I shall most certainly blog about it later.

There was one article somewhere claiming the virginia and other shootings were mainly influenced by video games. I smugly accepted, considering some person might get influenced by all the killing that you do in a game, and might’ve done it for real.

I was doing my half hour daily gaming ritual, playing GTA: San Andreas (a great game, I wholly recommend it) Here you’re set loose in a city and you can kill anyone or run over lots of people and become an international criminal if you want to. Now this game has been claimed to be responsible for a lot of things and has received a very bad response from some people.

So here’s the mission, I’m chasing down this drug smuggler and trying to kill him with my M4 Rifle, and I accidentally hit a civilian, and I felt sick. Not because I took an innocent life, but because now the cops were gonna come after me. And then it struck me!

Three golden rules every gamer knows:

1. In a game, reckless killing can get you killed or arrested or something but it won’t be too much fun for you.
2. A game is about fun and enjoyment, and very rarely about killing. Even if killing is the primary objective, like in Quake 3 Arena, where the primary objective is to go around killing everyone you see(while others are doing the same). Here it’s not even called a kill, it’s called a frag. If you’re killed you don’t respawn with a 150 bullets, but if you’re fragged you do. And I don’t keep up with the news much but I’ve never seen “Mass student fragging in this university”
3. All games have a fight for a greater good. Every kill has an objective, weather it’s for points, or to unlock higher levels or whatever, it’s all about the objectives. You don’t celebrate that you blew someone’s head clean off, you celebrate you finished the tough mission.

What pissed me off was that some articles blamed everything on videogames. There are millions of gamers in the world today, and why don’t all of them take a gun out and go rampaging around

The point is that you shouldn’t be trying to blame the shooting on something. If a kid really wants to shoot the crap out of people, he will. There’s no stopping him. No gun laws, no rules, no security checks, nothing.

What will prevent it is that if everyone had something to do with their time and doesn’t give them the time to go around killing people. In other words, they need a good pastime.

Might I suggest a good game of Quake 3?

Things are hard as hell, but that’s the way I love it. The only disadvantage seems to be that i don’t get a moment to update this site. Lots of stuff coming your way I assure you. So for all four of you who follow this weblog, be prepared!

Shake the silence and hear what it says
The tranquil pride that become the lie
Sell me the infection, it is only for the weak
No need for sympathy, the misery that is me

Winamp Now Playing: In Flames – Only for the Weak